Tim Lougheed
The University of Ottawa’s Department of Chemistry has added to its considerable number of Polanyi Prize winners, with assistant professor David Bryce now becoming the sixth to join the group.
The honour, which includes an award of $15,000, was established by the Ontario government to support outstanding researchers at an early stage in their careers. Named after John Charles Polanyi, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, up to five of these prizes are awarded annually to recipients in the general areas of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic science.
Bryce joined the University as a faculty member earlier this year, after conducting postdoctoral work at the University of Alberta, and then at the National Institutes of Health Laboratory of Chemical Physics in Bethesda, Maryland. His research focuses on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, employing powerful magnetic fields to explore the behaviour of molecules at the subatomic level.
As part of his PhD, Bryce tackled atomic nuclei that have been regarded as difficult to analyze with NMR, enabling him to obtain results that challenged the current textbook interpretation of these systems. This work earned him an NSERC doctoral prize in 2003 and the National Institutes of Health Fellows Award for Research Excellence in 2004.
In November 2005, he welcomed the launch of a new NMR facility at the National Research Council’s Montreal Road campus. Faculty of Science dean Christian Detellier was among those who spearheaded a national consortium of universities that raised in excess of $12 million to construct and house this state-of-the-art instrument.
Previous Department of Chemistry winners of the Polanyi Prize include Natalie Kazumi Goto (2004), Keith Fagnou (2003), Louis Barriault (2000), Deryn Fogg (1997), and Susannah Scott (1994).
